The Parable of the Sower: Part 1, The Story

So far this series on Jesus’ parables has dealt with introductory material, looking for a definition of what a parable is, and trying to understand Jesus’ surprising rationale for using them. While I thought it was important to tackle this last piece before jumping into any of the parables themselves, all three of the Gospels that include it put it right in the middle of their discussion of the Parable of the Sower. And so it seems only fitting to start the studies of individual parables with this one today.

But that said, upon reading the texts carefully, it becomes apparent that there’s a difference between how the parable itself reads and the interpretation Jesus later provides for it. So, to give both their due, I’ll be breaking the study up. Today I’ll focus on the story itself, as found in Matthew 13.3-9 (cf. Mark 4.3-9; Luke 8.5-8). Then next time, I’ll look at Jesus’ interpretation and how and why it has a different emphasis than the story itself.

(If you don’t have time to read the whole study, feel free to skip to the summary at the end.)

Text

For the sake of today’s study, I’ll be using Matthew’s version of the story:

[13.3] And he told them many things in parables, saying:

“Look! A sower went out to sow. [4] And as he sowed, some seeds fell along the road and birds came and ate them up. [5] But others fell on rocky ground, where there was not much soil; while they immediately sprung up since the soil was not deep, [6] when the sun rose they were scorched and withered because they were not well-rooted. [7] Others, for their part, fell among thorns. The thorns grew and chocked them. [8] But others fell on good ground and produced fruit, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. [9] Let those who have ears hear! (Matthew 13.3-9)

Experience

Our reading of the parables of Jesus is often hindered by our familiarity with them and I definitely ran into that with this one. As soon as I read the words “A sower went out to sow,” my mind automatically filled in the rest of the story — or at least what it thinks it knows about it. This makes me want to slow down and explore some of the details and really lean into the idea of “what else can I learn from this?” As I slowed down and re-read it, I noticed that where my default interpretation jumps to the different kinds of ground on which the seed falls (likely due to Jesus’ interpretation of the parable), the focus of the story seems actually to be on the sower — his excessive and even frivolous handling of the seed and seeming lack of concern for the yield. This seems worthy of further investigation.

Encounter

In the text, we encounter Jesus, who begins a whole discourse of parables with this one (13.3a). This position seems potentially important: Why might Jesus start a discourse full of parables about the Kingdom of Heaven with this one?

In the story we meet only a farmer, but, the different types of ground also become ‘characters’ in the story, driving the plot (such as it is).

Explore

These first two steps have identified two broad questions that will guide the rest of the study:

• What might the literary context tell us about the story and its meaning?
• Is there anything about the parable’s details, especially about the sower, that is important for understanding it?

Literary Matters

Literary Context

As noted last time, the three Gospels which record this parable all place it at the start of a series of parables about the Kingdom of God (which Matthew calls the ‘Kingdom of Heaven’). While they position this larger discourse at different points in Jesus’ ministry, it’s always at a transition point, where Jesus is starting to encounter more opposition to his message (Hagner 104).* Here in Matthew’s Gospel, this parable also opens the third — and therefore central — discourse of the five into which he organizes Jesus’ teaching (Wilson 445, Hagner 102). And so all three of the relevant Gospels, but especially Matthew, give this story pride of place within Jesus’ teaching (Capon). We might therefore expect it to convey something essential or programmatic to his message.

What might such a programmatic message be? If the most obvious reading of the story itself, apart from the interpretation Jesus provides, is correct, it suggests a central message of a prolifically generous God, who pours out truth, mercy, and blessing upon the whole world without any thought to the possible return. This actually works quite well as a kind of thesis statement for Jesus’ ministry, in which he taught that God is like a generous father giving gifts to his children and like a woman who upends her whole house looking for a lost coin, and in which he did away with concerns of ritual purity, welcomed ‘sinners’, and broke taboos surrounding nationality, class, and gender.

Story vs. Interpretation

Breaking the study of this parable into two parts requires us to at least be open to differentiating between the meaning of the parable and Jesus’ own interpretation of it. While I’ll look at this issue more closely next time, for now I’ll point out that I’m far from the only one to notice the apparent different emphases from the story and its interpretation. Throughout much of the history of the critical study of the Gospels, scholars have assumed that the interpretation was a separate and later text added to Jesus’ original teaching by the evangelists (Hagner 105; Crossan 39; Scott 344). No matter what we may think about that, the evidence suggests a fluid tradition surrounding the parable in the earliest Church. For example, the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas includes the parable without an interpretation, and the late-first-century text 1 Clement (24.5) pulls out a different theme from it). So, I think it’s fair to treat the text as distinct from Jesus’ interpretation of it, even as we insist that the interpretation is also part of the canonical expression of Jesus’ teachings..

Narrative Details

Metaphors of sowing and harvesting for doing God’s work are common in Old Testament and Second Temple Jewish literature (e.g., Psalm 125.5; Jeremiah 31.27-28, 38.27-30; Hosea 2.21-23; Joel 3.12-14; Ezekiel 36.9; 4 Ezra (= 2 Esdras) 9.31; 2 Baruch 32.1) (Gale; Walton & Keener; OSB). So Jesus is traveling down well-worn symbolic roads here. Since Jesus has so much to say about the types of soil in his interpretation, I’ll focus today on the sower and the seeds, and make only a quick comment about the soil.

The Sower

The parable begins by introducing the character of the sower, who is portrayed as generously — wastefully and perhaps even foolishly — spreading seed on every surface, without thought to its possibility of success. Over the centuries, there’s been differing opinions about who the sower refers to: Is it God the Father spreading divine blessing on the world? Is it the prophets of old with their message of repentance? Is it Jesus preaching the Gospel? Or is it Christian evangelists? I think ultimately the answer is simply ‘yes’. Jesus is talking about a basic fundamental reality: Just as God’s truth is seeded in to the structure of the world, ‘everywhere present and filling all things’, yet not everywhere understood (cf., Romans 1.18-31), so too does Jesus go out into the world liberally preaching truth that is not universally accepted. And, as it is with Jesus, through the fractal nature of the Christian faith, so it will be with us. We are to be as generous and free with spreading God’s love in the world as the sower here, and to expect similarly varied responses (Hagner 106; Palamas 51; Capon).

A shocking amount of scholarly ink has been shed over the decades about the extent to which the sower’s technique is representative of actual first-century farming practices. The question is whether the audience was supposed to see in the sower’s actions the usual way of doing things or whether they were supposed to be shocked at the waste. The basic technique described in the parable, known as broadcast seeding, was common, however the lack of concern for where the seed lands would certainly be surprising (Hagner 104; NIV TSB). A related question that has garnered a lot of study — though with conflicting results — is whether it was common practice to sow a field before ploughing. I’m inclined into agree with Hagner that the question is irrelevant since ploughing is not mentioned at all in the parable. It seems best to me to focus, as Jesus does, not on the sower’s technique, but on his generosity. Barbara Brown Taylor describes the character beautifully when she writes that the parable is about:

the generosity of our maker, the prolific sower who does not obsess about the condition of the fields, who is not stingy with the seed but who casts it everywhere, on good soil and bad, who is not cautious or judgmental or even very practical, but who seems willing to keep reaching into his seed bag for all eternity, covering the whole creation with the fertile seed of his truth. (The Seeds of Heaven, cited by Nuechterlein Proper 10A)

That said, from the ancient world until today, the silence of the parable about ploughing has invited a lot of comment: Is there anything we can do to prepare our heart to make it more receptive to the word of God? While not the focus of the parable itself, I think this is a wonderful and faithful extension of it (Nuechterlein Proper 10A; Palamas 54). As St. Gregory Palamas put it in a fourteenth-century homily: “Why does he not plow before sowing? Because this preliminary work on our souls prior to sowing ought to be done by us” (Palamas 54).

Seeds

The seeds don’t require a lot of comment, but it’s interesting to note that seeds are ‘self-operating’; they contain everything they need to produce the growth and eventual good fruit for which they are intended. The sower doesn’t need to do anything and indeed cannot do anything to ‘make’ them sprout: they just do. As Robert Farrar Capon put it, “The seed, and therefore the Word, is fully in action in and of itself at every step of the story. Everything necessary for its perfect work is in the works from the start.” Capon also notes, extending the meaning of the parable, that the power of the seed is not dependent on the ground’s receptivity and not only is that power not destroyed by being eaten by birds or animals, but in some cases even depends on it!

In the interpretation, the seed will be identified as “the word,” or “the word of the kingdom.” In context, it refers to Jesus’ message, the Good News of God’s salvation and the life of the Kingdom of God, but by extension it can be thought of as the seeds of truth implanted in all creation (the ‘logoi’ of creation, as St. Maximus the Confessor called them), the message of the prophets, and even Jesus himself (whom, of course, John calls ‘the Word’) (Capon; Hagner 106; Palamas 50).

Types of Ground

We’ll focus on the types of ground next time, but for today it’s safe to say that the four kinds of surface are intended to represent and include all the various types and conditions of human beings. In the story itself, the sower sows liberally irrespective of the likelihood of success.

Challenge

Normally this section focuses on critical readings of the text that may challenge traditional interpretations. But, since parables are intended to surprise and subvert expectations, in this series I’ll be looking at how the parable would challenge its original audience, as well as the questions that pose a challenge for us today.

Subversion of First-Century Expectations

It’s likely this is a case where the distance between us and the original context might be too great to know this with any certainty. My best guess would be that the sower’s wastefulness would stick out most. In a heavily-taxed, subsistence level agricultural context where every seed and grain would be valuable, it’s hard to imagine a farmer tossing seed around without caring where it falls. This only adds to the power of the parable, as it presents God’s generosity as frivolously excessive.

As Howard Thurman and Robert Farrar Capon note, a further surprising element of the story is that Israel as a distinct nation or people are nowhere to be found in it (Thurman; Capon). There is no reference here to a specific vineyard or plot of land; rather, such identifiers are missing and the seed is sown outside the boundaries of the field. The Kingdom “is at work everywhere, always, and for all, rather than in some places, at some times, and for some people” (Capon). In the context of the religious authorities’ growing suspicions about Jesus and his supposed laxity when it came to Law-keeping and other Jewish identity markers, it’s unlikely this would have gone unnoticed (Capon).

Contemporary Challenges

As I’ll touch on briefly next time, there are some extreme socio-economic readings of this parable (see von Eck and Herzog), which claim that Jesus’ point was purely economic — a critique of heavy Roman taxation of Judaean produce — and that any spiritual interpretation of the story misses the point and is the result of the Church’s spiritual bypassing of his critique of Empire. I don’t think these claims should be taken seriously. They demand that a story only be about what it’s about without any symbolic or analogical meaning — so, a story about a farmer must, and must only, be about agrarian economics. This is an unfounded and to my mind silly assumption: Not only does it require the ‘authentic’ parable to be completely stripped out of its narrative, but it also stands in opposition to the extensive use of symbols and analogies in teaching in the ancient world, both Jewish and Gentile.

Expand

So, how does our emerging reading encourage us to grow in faithfulness and love? What we have here is first and foremost a parable about the excessive love and generosity of God, which works well as a programmatic statement of Jesus’ teaching. This invites us today to be similarly unbounded when it comes to our expressions of love, compassion, and mercy, as well as our teaching. (As the saying goes, “Preach the Gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.”)

Summary and Conclusions

At a time when his ministry was facing growing opposition, Jesus changed his teaching strategy, couching his message in stories that were meant to delight and shock, enlighten and confound, depending on the condition of those hearing him. The first such story is about the excessive love and generosity of God, who never ceases in pouring out truth, grace, and blessing upon a world that is rarely receptive. Our only duty is, like God, to be generous in sharing it.

But Jesus also had something to say about this story, and his emphasis is a little different. Next time, we’ll shift to that text and explore why this difference exists and whether we should be concerned about it.

 

* For full references, please see the series bibliography.